An experiment is designed to test if individuals show (unrealistic) optimism when determining their subjective probabilities about exogenous circumstances. Subjects in the control group make an informed guess about a number, under a payment scheme that rewards close guesses. In the treatment...

We model the formation of teams as a random matching process influenced by the agents’ preferences for team size and gender composition. We test hypotheses regarding gender and team preferences on the patterns of coauthorship in articles published 1991-2002 in three top economic journals. We...

U.S. strategy against the production and distribution of illegal drugs in and from source countries uses both supply and demand side anti-drug policies with the aim of increasing drug prices. In source countries, the trends for potential drug production (or area cultivated with coca and opium...

This paper analyses the effects of mergers on price and welfare in markets facing congestion and derives conditions under which a merger is consumer welfare improving, even in the absence of marginal cost savings. In our context a merger basically has two effects. First, it obviously increases...

Using data on registered emigration from Sweden from 1991-2000, this study analyzes emigration propensities for natives and immigrants delineating among immigrant emigrants between return and onward migration. Return migration is defined as migration back to source countries and onward migration...

In this paper the recent effect of the European Monetary Union on inward FDI-flows is examined. We use a difference-in-differences approach and fixed effects with common time controls. The estimated results of the latter approach show that the introduction of the Euro raises inward FDI by 17...

Trademark dilution, whereby a firm associates its product with that of another firm and takes advantage of the goodwill created by that firm, is illegal in the EU and in the US. We investigate this regulation from a welfare perspective, considering short-term effects on profits and consumers’...

This paper models the behaviour of a Competition Authority (CA) that takes into consideration alternative future mergers when deciding whether to approve a current merger notification. The result is a more stringent CA that demands higher merger-efficiencies than the ones needed to restore...

The degree of income inequality in Sweden has varied substantially since the 1970s. This study analyzes whether this variation has affected the crime rate using a panel of Swedish county-level data for the period 1973–2000. We consider various measures of income inequality to evaluate which...

A lot of attention has been directed towards recent financial crises around the world. It seems that financial markets are prone to herding, panics, contagion and boom-bust cycles. Empirical studies have found that short-term flows increase financial fragility and also increase the probability...